SUNSET OVERDRIVE
Mindless not fun.
By Ian Thrasher
I jump up on top of a car and bounce my way up to a power wire. I grind across a sea of mutated monsters, OD’s they call them. I shoot them with my gun which fires ricocheting vinyl discs. They eventually die. I make my way over to the next horde. I shoot them with more vinyl discs. More death. I come across a bunch of Scabs. They have guns, but as long as I keep on moving and grinding, they can’t hit me. I drop them one by one, all the while a bombastic punk rock soundtrack blairs out to encourage me.
This sounds like it should be fun. Why am I not having fun then?
Perhaps it’s all the ways Sunset Overdrive manages to make the experience of parkouring and shooting feel weightless, and by weightless I mean lacking any sense of impact whatsoever. Guns lack a satisfying punch to them, movement feels stiff and rigid, and as long as I’m moving, which is borderline impossible to not be doing at any given moment, there’s no danger to me. Enemies can’t hit me as long as I stay above them and or keep moving, and even the ones who can hit me do jack all to slow me down or make me reconsider how I move around. The punk music is trying to push me forward and say, “Yeah! This game is fun! Wooooooo!” but I’m constantly thinking about how if I wanted mindless sandbox entertainment, I have better options. Saints Row IV and Prototype come to mind.
This is nothing to say of the story. We get an in media res opening that serves as our tutorial. There’s mutants and we’re running from them and eventually gunning them. We fight a tougher enemy until an old grizzled guy shoots an AK-47 at them and lures the monsters away. We don’t know why any of this is going on, but we get to our apartment and we have a flashback to our shitty job where we witness people being turned into the mutants from drinking a new energy drink. We run away in a cutscene and then we cut back to our apartment.
Side note: Usually when stories begin in media res, it’s to build up a mystery of how we got to that point, and usually we spend at least the first act solving that mystery through watching events unfold and building up to where we started, but here we solve that mystery immediately, so there’s no build up and therefore no payoff, so why start in media res?
Days pass, mutants eventually break down the barricades to our apartment and we get saved by Old Grizzled Guy, aka Walter, aka the King of Badass Entrances* (citation needed), and we join up with him and his ragtag band of survivors. We learn (through exposition, because of course) that the energy drink that’s mutating people was a fuck up on the part of a corrupt company named Fizzco and now they’re trying to damage control and pretend that all of Sunset City died in a virus outbreak, and we’re trying to escape and expose the lies.
It’s pretty clear from the in media res opening, the stale punk rock aesthetic, the undeserving character descriptions, and the fact that we can’t skip any of these cutscenes that this game is under the delusion that it is cute. It’s the kind of game that thinks using visual aids to state the obvious and pointing out video game contrivances is clever and subversive. However, we’re in a post Scott Pilgrim world, we’re in a post Saints Row IV world, we’re in a post Borderlands 2 world, hell, we even live in a post Jet Set Radio world, and if those pieces of media are anything to go by, being clever and subversive takes thought and effort, which cannot be said about anything to do with the experience of Sunset Overdrive.
Ian Thrasher is a graduate of the University of Utah’s EAE Program and lifelong video game player and overthinker. Aside from writing about video games, he also likes worshiping Fallout New Vegas and setting Sims on fire after building them a fancy mansion. You can follow him on Twitter @ian_thrasher or look up his Medium profile.